Furry seems unusual for a "creative" fandom in that the main impetus for creativity seems less about actually making something yourself - or learning to do so - and more about buying things from others or making things for others in exchange for money.
Let me start by saying this is much more understandable when you remember the huge influence the sexual side of things has on the fandom. People may be willing to tolerate mediocre fantasy art done with coloured pencils, but their standards for pornography are higher (to a degree) for a variety of reasons. Plenty of attention has been devoted to considering the sexual side of the fandom, so that's not really interesting to discuss except as it relates to the commercial side of things, which is what's fascinating.
In a standard fandom - even a highly creative one, such as a videogame modding community, you have a pretty clear hierarchy. You have the producer of the game, then the modders, and then the reviewers and players who bother to join in. With Furry things are much more diffuse and social. Some artists doubtless find themselves below some serial-commissioners, and I daresay that ultimately the hierarchy within the fandom as a whole (which contains several social subgroups) would probably look a lot like one built on wealth, rather than one built on say individual creative talents, abilities, or spare time. An investment banker without any creative skill whatsoever can substitute this immediately with his vast income - buy a character from someone else, commission a third party to make more art of that character (even taking up YCHs instead of proposing their own unique artistic scenario if desired), and buying a suit. With such a vast presence, they would doubtless be noticed by the community even though they haven't personally done anything - they've just paid others to put in the necessary work.
That may sound moralising and negative, as though I'm saying the banker has no right to do that. I'm not concerned with right and wrong, I'm fascinated because other internet communities don't seem to work like that. Furry has a lot of fascinating social trends - the unwillingness to explicitly reject people (but willingness to ignore them), the open sexuality, the weird nature of the history of a young fandom still hanging over it, and so on, but the commercial element is without doubt the most fascinating. There is a second element I want to touch on here, which is that as a whole furries seem to take a lot of pride in being a commercial entity. (Images for illustrative purposes. Values not necessarily accurate.) When you calculate the economic throughput of commissions, or fursuit prices, or so on, the impression is often that commercial success is a sign of acceptance by the wider world - laugh all you like at the man dressed as a poodle, but do you laugh when you find out that a group of such suits is worth more than a bay-area apartment? Contrast some other communities, which reject commercialisation - see for example the paid mods debacle on Steam - even though their wider mass appeal would surely mean even greater incomes. Maybe it's that modders were never "fursecuted", or are taken for novel and acceptable hobbies that don't feel the need to be validated. Maybe it's a matter of different personalities being drawn to different fandoms. Maybe it's a matter of the different social effects of income. I don't know.
The final interesting element - returning to the hierarchy introduced earlier - is of course that furry has no central producers. This is not "The Zootopia Fandom" where Disney outranks everyone else, but a fandom essentially of itself, if you are a furry then presumably you like things that furries produce, so the overall result is something of an ouroboros. Obviously there's a wider community element to the whole thing - you don't just consume art, but you talk about basically everything. But the way this interacts with money is non-trivial, since naturally people will find themselves drawn to the profiles of those with art, or with art to share, or they'll show friendship by buying art featuring two individuals. That's unusual - perhaps due to the surprising breadth of the fandom itself which runs the gamut from a pure fetish community to the zootopia fandom, leaving much more scope for cross-pollination than you'd get in say a Deviantart fetish community which has much clearer boundaries.
It's all very interesting, but that about approaches the limits of my own understanding of the fandom since I can only look in from the periphery. Sometimes it seems that the decentralised commercialised approach is the economic and social future we're heading for in "real life", in various weird and wonderful forms. At the apotheosis of this, you can already cut out the middleman and rent a friend if you're so-inclined.